Table of contents for Christmas 2024 in Edge

This month we spent a bit of time thinking about game names. Halo and Destiny sprang readily to mind as classics from modern times, with plenty in common: both are snappy and iconic-feeling, with a sci-fi edge and the suggestion of something mysterious at play. Kudos to Bungie’s Department Of Naming Things, which might well have seen some staff turnover since the days of Marathon, a frankly awful name for an energetic shooter. Far better examples would be Half-Life (instant sci-fi vibes, along with the implication of threat) and of course the mighty, none-more-monolithic Doom. And then there is an entire horde of zombie games whose names just work, including Left 4 Dead, Dying Light and Dead Rising. (All better than Resident Evil, if we’re being honest.) Another of our…

Narrative tensions Alex Spencer (The Outer Limits, E402) and I agree on the ‘anti-Zelda adaptation’ premise, but disagree with suggestions to: (a) mirror players’ experimentation with playfully creative cause-effect sequences, and (b) incorporate videogame-specific mise-en-scene. I’m half onboard with the latter. Using cinema’s tools in unconventional, gameinspired ways can work (Mario Galaxy-like angles, for example, as Spencer notes). However, elements unique to games (eg, health bars) shouldn’t be attempted in IP adaptations. Paying homage to games is different to adapting game IP. Breaking conventions needs caution or they risk becoming reductive references. As would – and I’ll die on this Hyrulian hill – comedy. Player failings and zany characters notwithstanding, Zelda games aren’t comedies. Link having a physical map to navigate the Lost Woods is cinematic; onscreen compasses are not.…

While waiting on the train platform, I notice a few words scratched into a nearby bilboard: “Play chess with me”. Minus the username etched alongside, it’s the kind of graffiti you’d expect to find behind plexiglass at an archaeological site. I’m not really one of those ‘message from the universe’ people, but you can’t argue with its sense of occasion. The train I’m catching is to the annual London Film Festival Expanded, as seen in my very first column, and that has me reflecting on the mission I’ve pursued since that, ahem, “mushroom-based experience”. Namely, to expand my personal definition of interactive entertainment – from ancient boardgames to tech-billionaire visions of the future – and in the process hopefully remind myself what’s so great about the sort we focus on…

Developer/publisher Supermassive Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin UK Release 2025 Peruse the promotional materials surrounding Directive 8020 and you may not realise it’s a continuation of The Dark Pictures Anthology. The branding is there, but much lower in the mix this time, with no real fanfare to announce this game as the beginning of season two. Perhaps, though, now is the right time for a shift in strategy. After some tentative nudges towards more direct player control in its multicharacter horror formula, here Supermassive Games wants to take a decisive leap. The off-planet setting is the most obvious way this latest game differs from past Dark Pictures, as Directive 8020 heads into sciencefiction territory, the title a reference to a NASA policy regarding the protection of Earth from…

ICE WIND DALE Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios) Format PC Release 2000 ICEWIND DALE II Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios) Format PC Release 2002 NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2 Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Atari Interactive Format PC Release 2006 ALPHA PROTOCOL  Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Sega Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2010 FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS  Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2010 PILLARS OF ETERNITY Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Paradox Interactive Format PC Release 2015 PILLARS OF ETERNITY II: DEADFIRE  Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Versus Evil Format PC Release 2018 PENTIMENT Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Obsidian Entertainment) Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022 Like many developers of his generation, Josh Sawyer stumbled into a career in videogames. “I went to school originally for…

To say that a videogame can change someone’s life – let alone save it – might sound a tad hyperbolic. But for Zhenghua Yang, head of developer and boutique publisher Serenity Forge, it’s true in the most literal sense. Yang, more commonly known as ‘Z’ (with the American pronunciation), suffers from chronic refractory idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare autoimmune disease, from which he almost died at the age of 18. That experience is retold in Yang’s, and Serenity Forge’s, first game, Loving Life. It’s a short nonfictional visual novel, the writing both affecting and unflinching, as it follows young student Yang from studying in his campus dorm to, suddenly, lying in a hospital bed – where he was given a pen and paper to write his will, with doctors not…

Developer/publisher Sega (Studio Zero) Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Atlus’ latest RPG shares a lot with its most famous series, but it’s no Persona 6, and not only because it abandons contemporary Japan for a fantasy world. Reassembling in the new guise of Studio Zero, the lead creatives of Personas 3–5 have set out in a different direction. True, Metaphor: ReFantazio features the familiar calendar systems, social links and turn-based combat. But here they’re reworked to suit more traditional fantasy trappings, into which the game dives thirstily, while pulling in the talents of artists from the likes of Evangelion and Nier: Automata ensured Zero’s debut would be unconventional. So it goes: this is a unique RPG that will surely steal hearts just as adeptly as…

Developer Deck Nine Games Publisher Square Enix  Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Arcadia Bay might be in the rearview mirror for Max Caulfield, but her time there left its mark. It’s been ten years since Max was forced to choose between Bay or bae, a decision that left her (and many players of the first game) stuck in a limbo between acceptance and regret, unable to fully move on. This grey area is the main focus of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, which ruminates on the duplexities of decision-making through a much more literal lens. Protagonist Max, once able to rewind time, can now jump between timelines, a superpower activated by the suspicious death of her close friend, Safi. This ability allows Max to swap between…

Developer Striking Distance Studios Publisher Krafton Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now When one of the escaped convicts in Redacted quips that they’d rather be back in their cell playing Hades, you have to marvel at the audacity. Having borrowed so liberally from Supergiant’s mythical Roguelike, Striking Distance doesn’t even have the shame to hide it. Yet by the time you hear this line, chances are you’ll be invested in your own escape attempt and Redacted’s loop of violence and incremental empowerment. The studio has learned a lesson from The Callisto Protocol: if you’re going to ape a wellknown title, make sure you nail its core conceits. Redacted is a spinoff from Callisto, revisiting Black Iron Prison after an outbreak of something unpleasant. Tonally, however, it’s lighter…

Few chapters in videogame historyhave been retold as often as the origins of Tetris. The story of how this game was created by Alexey Pajitnov in the offices of a Soviet ministry, and how multiple parties on the other side of the Iron Curtain fought over its ownership, with Henk Rogers emerging the unlikely winner, has in the past decade alone been adapted into non-fiction book by Dan Ackerman, a comic by Box Brown, and 2023’s Apple TV biopic. Now it’s the turn of Digital Eclipse: Tetris Forever, the third of its Gold Master interactive documentaries, is due out later this year. “I feel like the Tetris story is famous to videogame nerds,” specifies Chris Kohler, Digital Eclipse’s editorial director. “And now, maybe, to people who have watched the film,”…

“One thing I would be ecstatic to never do again in a videogame… is press a button to send a visible pulse through the environment…”Then precisely how does Impromptu Games’ Joe Wintergreen propose we should have our pickups denoted and incoming enemies outlined? ”Nobody at Bethesda is patting themselves on the back…”Bethesda’s Emil Pagliarulo looks Shattered Space’s 58% Metacritic score in the eye ”The only thing I’d like to say as an engine programmer… is that this console absolutely rocks.”No Man Sky’s Martin Griffiths confirms one PS5 Pro preorder “Cloud Imperium just invented a time machine taking us back to the dark ages… I was naive enough to think this was a thing of the past.”As the Star Citizen crew sample seven-day work weeks, Liquid Swords’ Christofer Sundberg reminds us:…

A sked to nominate one public figure who has contributed most to the wider understanding of videogame terminology, you might not immediately think of Dominic Cummings, the former aide to Boris Johnson who took a jaunt to Barnard Castle to, er, check his eyesight during the pandemic. But credit where it is due – he has almost single-handedly imported into political language the derogatory reference to other humans in the real world as ‘NPCs’. A ‘non-player character’ was originally a character in tabletop RPGs of the 1970s, such as Dungeons & Dragons, whose behaviour is described by the DM, with whom players could have some defined interactions, such as buying or selling items. More work remains to be done to trace the term’s exact origin: it is not yet in…

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Hype content Matters of perspective Navigating 3D worlds through the eyes of a game character; running left and right in a 2D platform game – two activities you’ve done a thousand times. Now try doing both together. Our first chance to play Screenbound – a firstperson puzzle game in which your actions are mirrored on a Game Boy-like device – shows how much relearning is required. It’s also a reminder that divided attention is a wonderful state for designers to play with, as evidenced previously in parts of American Arcadia and moments in Dead Space: Extraction when you must rivet a barricade or solder a fuse while fending off bloodthirsty aliens. Building a whole game around the concept, though, is a different…

Developer Motion Twin  Publisher Motion Twin, Kepler Ghost Format PC  Origin France  Release TBA An age-old question for any creative with an unexpected hit on their hands: Where next? Dead Cells was developed as something of a last hope for Motion Twin, the French studio which had been making games for the best part of two decades by that point. As Gwenaël Massé once told us, for E352’s Studio Profile, the game was conceived as a “blaze of glory”, going out making the kinds of games the developers loved, rather than “something that we were just historically lumped with” by the company’s previous output. Of course, Dead Cells was such a success that it not only kept the studio alive but led to the creation of another, Evil Empire, to…

Developer/publisher Don’t Nod (Don’t Nod Montréal) Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Canada Release February 18 Don’t Nod’s next narrative-led adventure has plenty of Life Is Strange about it, but also a heaped spoonful of Stephen King. The group dynamic among its teenage characters recalls stories such as The Body (which became the film Stand By Me) or even It, albeit with the difference that protagonist Swann and friends are all girls. The It comparison stretches to a dual-timeline structure too, as our demo begins with Swann in her 40s meeting former pal Autumn at a diner in 2022. The pair haven’t spoken in years, and are only reuniting now owing to the recent arrival of a mysterious, ominous package addressed to their teenage band, Bloom & Rage. Precisely why…

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Founded in 1986 by firebrand designer Ian Anderson, TDR – aka The Designers Republic – is a figurehead of the SoYo (as in South Yorkshire) movement, self-styled opponents of an older, supposedly stagnant design scene in London. Its style is one of Russian Constructivism bred with Asian logotypes and ’90s information overload – altogether dubbed ‘Nihonpop’ by fans. But in truth it is more varied, as shown by TDR’s work with electronic music label Warp Records. Much of its output is antiestablishment, littered with merry bastardisations of corporate brands and slogans. In 1995, Keith Hopwood, creative services manager at Psygnosis, was at its door. “Ian was spiky,” Hopwood recalls. “I’m embarrassed to say I was completely in awe of him and what they stood for. He was a bit dismissive…

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Developer Reflector Entertainment Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now An awakening implies the start of something bigger, and the creators of Unknown 9 are clearly thinking along those lines. Alongside the game, you can explore the surrounding ‘transmedia’: a parallel comic series, a trio of novels, a podcast, and more to come. It’s fiction as a platform, designed to support multiple tales, set in multiple periods and places. Shortly after beginning Awakening, though, we’re questioning that ambition. Amid stealth, combat and navigation routines, we see little sign of the creative spark required to deliver a riveting adventure, let alone have us heading to a bookseller for more. Awakening plants its flag in the early 20th century and centres on a young…

Developer Oxide Games Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC Release Out now While Ara: History Untold shamelessly banks on its resemblance to Sid Meier’s Civilization, beneath its alluring façade are surprisingly different foundations. Like turn-based strategy’s most beloved grandpa, Ara is about spinning wilfully misremembered stories of the past, but its tales are distinguished by a more competitive three-act structure and a more granular city simulation. Sadly, the features that set Ara apart are too often the source of its shortcomings, overly weighing its emphasis on urban infrastructure at the expense of other systems. The basics are virtually identical to Firaxis’ work. You pick a historical society represented by one of its famous figureheads (such as Elizabeth I for Britain or Julius Caesar for Rome), and must guide them from…

HARDWARE Roto VR Explorer bit.ly/seatspin VR has always been about tradeoffs. How much cost – not just monetary, but in time and fuss – are you willing to put up with in exchange for (theoretically) total immersion? This ‘Made For Meta’ chair might be the ultimate test of that equation. Strap its Pokéball-looking head tracker to your Quest and the chair’s hefty motorised base will perform its party trick with aplomb, spinning your body left and right to match whichever way you look. A novelty, but one that nicely plays up VR’s inherent theme-park qualities. We’re less impressed with its haptic feedback, though, which always seems to lag behind the audio, so that we hear its floor-shaking rumbles like an echo. This makes it hard to justify the £799 price…

Normally this column begins “I played a game today…” but the truth is that I haven’t played a game today – or this entire week – because I’m bug-fixing. If you’ve not an industry person and you’re wondering what the QA process of a game is like, the simile people usually use is Whack-A-Mole, the arcade-cabinet classic in which you hit pop-up moles with a mallet. I don’t resonate with that – Whack-A-Mole is good muscular fun with a 1950s Hanna- Barbera narrative layer over the top, whereas bug-fixing, for me, is more like living in a houseboat that’s infested with so many termites you can hear them eating through the hull in your sleep. Like all terrible things, there’s an arc to it: the first bug reports from early…

Developer/publisher Crescent Moon Games  Format PC Origin US Release TBA Following two screens at once shouldn’t be too much of an ask these days. Indeed, our first impression as we sit down with Screenbound is that it’s like looking at your phone while walking around the house, which we usually manage without stubbing a toe. As for its multitasking demands, if we can split our attention between a TV show and a socialmedia feed, surely they shouldn’t prove too great a problem. So why, then, is Screenbound such a strange adjustment? Simply because here the two realities are symbiotic. If it’s any consolation, the two-man team at the core of the project, game director Josh Presseisen and lead developer Kyle McKeever, don’t claim to have it all figured out either.…

Developer/publisher Torn Banner Studios Format PC Origin Canada Release TBA One of the direst enemies in any zombie survival game is familiarity. This, and the contempt it engenders, is a foe that Torn Banner Studios has clearly thought about at length. There’s a lot here you’ll be expecting: you’re dropped into a barren post-industrial wilderness to pick your way through the shambling hordes of infected; you must scavenge weapons, patch up injuries and ensure you never find yourself surrounded. But this is also an eightplayer co-op game that you always begin in exactly the same way – alone. It’s a thrillingly distinct way to kick things off, and dictates the pace. Your first task, after taking stock of your meagre starting supplies (a pipe, a flashlight and a few rounds…

Developer Denkiworks Publisher Critical Reflex Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release TBA Summers are known for being sweltering in Japan but also for their traditional festivals, chief among them Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri, whose procession of floats, performances and rituals attracts people from all over the country. In the quiet, rural town of Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, however, we find ourselves at the opposite end of the scale. Indeed, its end-of-summer festival might fail to launch at all. The shrine has been neglected, its torii gate in lop-sided disrepair and handcleansing pavilion lacking water. Other ritualistic fundamentals, meanwhile, such as the lion-dog statues that guard the shrine’s entrance and the ema stand where visitors write their wishes, are missing altogether. It thus falls upon plucky raccoon dog Pon to…

NEAR MISSES Thronefall PC, Switch Grand strategy made miniature is the little big idea here, as you take on the role of a tiny horse-riding king, fortifying by day, fending off enemies by night. Each blank map is dotted with designated spots where you’ll place a castle, houses, mines, defensive towers and soldier-producing forts. Residences and workplaces yield a daily income to be spent on building or strengthening, before fast-forwarding to the evening’s invasion. Survive a set number of days of increasing hostility and the next level unlocks. It’s a neat, breezy slice of strategy, and the balance is well-honed, following a spell in early access. Zoochosis PC In the two weeks following its launch, Zoochosis has averaged a patch per day, which tells a story about the state it…

Developer Bloober Team Publisher Konami Format PC, PS5 (tested)  Release Out now We have no reason to trust him, but we follow him into the fog. In some parts of Silent Hill, the mist is thin. Elsewhere, it’s as heavy as oil, spilling out over Toluca Lake as if it’s ready to drown us. We hesitate – this is Silent Hill 2, and violence is inevitable – but we keep trudging forward. Like James Sunderland, the haggard protagonist who’s under our control, we learn to coexist with every noxious monster that squirms out of a million shades of grey, even as Bloober Team makes sure that the process feels as gruesome as possible. Like a cherished memory, this remake is a more glamorous version of the past. While it has…

Developer Nomada Studios Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS5 (tested), Switch, Xbox Series Release Out now To accept a pet into your life is to know that, unless something goes catastrophically wrong, you will outlive them. Neva makes no bones about this. The two animals that flank your human protagonist in the opening cutscene might be lupine comrades-inarms rather than canine companions, at least initially. But when one is torn down in battle, and its noworphaned cub inches towards you for a comforting cuddle, the nature of their bond becomes clear. Neva – for such is the name of your new charge – begins the game almost entirely helpless. They’ll miss jumps on the first try, flopping to the ground and waiting for you to run over and help them…

Developer Hollow Ponds, Richard Hogg Publisher Finji Format PC Release Out now When you’re used to the sophistication of puzzles in, say, The Witness or Cocoon, it’s easy to scoff at the humble jigsaw. It’s a form, after all, that the youngest of children can decipher, and whose only means of greater complexity are dialling up the detail and numbers of pieces. For Wilmot, however, the smiling white square we first met in Wilmot’s Warehouse, there’s no greater pastime. As a subscriber to Puzzle Club, he awaits days off when the postwoman comes knocking with a box of bits ready to assemble. Strictly speaking, the puzzles in Wilmot Works It Out aren’t jigsaws, although they amount to the same thing. Pieces have none of the usual bobbles and divots, for…